The German government is offering back up for security forces in the Eastern state of Saxony. This after the second night of rioting over the killing of a German man in an altercation with migrants, sparking full blown riots on Monday evening.

According to an analysis commissioned by the government of Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria claimed the lives of 2,975 people – much higher than the 64 people the government of Puerto Rico initially reported.

The P-38 Lightning fighter plane was part of a “lost squadron” of planes that crashed-landed on Greenland during a blizzard on July 15, 1942. All crew members on the six P-38s and two B-17s were rescued after nine days, and the planes were left behind.

“The evidence just wasn’t there to convict alleged tax cheat Paul Manafort on most of the 18 charges that had been brought against him. This gave Special Counsel Robert Mueller his first clear defeat in his flagging hunt for an illegal Russia connection to Trump. Some observers claim jury bias in the few charges that prevailed. They cite pejorative media innuendoes attempting to tie Manafort to the Trump-Russia scandal. There’s no word yet on Manafort’s appeal strategy for the few convictions brought forth by the jury. So this is still not a closed issue. Manafort vehemently proclaims his innocence, contending he’s been a victim of Mueller’s illicit witch hunt for an unproven Russia connection to Trump.”

I don’t know about you, but my foregoing spoof paragraph is definitely not the way I saw the Manafort case covered by the media. It went more like this:

That’s a very different slant on things. Granted that my spoof above was deliberately slanted. But I did that as an object lesson to show by contrast the hysterical extreme the media have taken in their reportage. It seems they viewed the Manafort trial outcome as a gotcha moment in a campaign to deligitimize Trump.

There’s nothing basically wrong for citizens to attempt deligitimizing a president for whom they have disdain. But shouldn’t they do it while acting with integrity and legitimacy themselves?

Another highly spun part of the Manafort reportage has to do with the jury split on the majority of the charges. The New York Times put it this way:

“One Holdout Kept Jury From Convicting Paul Manafort on All Counts.”

An opposite spin could have asserted:

“Just One Juror Could Have Allowed All 18 of Mueller’s Russiagate Witch Hunt Charges Against Manafort to be Thrown Out.

It would have been better to simply present the facts without any spin. It sounds like the Times is pushing a point of view instead of the plain truth.

“Seek Truth and Report It” is the first tenet of the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethics code.

But instead of even seeking the truth, much less reporting it, the media outlets are off on a journalistic bender. They seem to be trying to invent a faux truth that outright conflicts with the actual truth.

This is especially apparent if you listen to the cable reportage of MSNBC and Fox News. Tune to MSNBC and you hear unabashed negative case making against Donald Trump. Switch over to Fox News and you can’t miss the oppositely framed coverage that finds virtue in almost everything Trump does.

But even coverage on Fox News took a fanciful anti-Trump turn after the president’s summit with Vladimir Putin. I’d like to know what was behind that switcheroo.

The SPJ code also proclaims, “The highest and primary obligation of ethical journalism is to serve the public.”

How is the public being served by media outlets on a mission to distort and fabricate?

I don’t know whether or not the Trump campaign colluded with Russians who are bent on doing harm to America. US politicians frequently allege that Putin is on a mission to destabilize and destroy America’s democracy. But there’s been no objective evidence presented. Despite that, we’ve seen a plethora of allegations.

For example, first we heard that all seventeen US intelligence agencies found that the Russian state was culpable in hacking Democratic National Committee servers (New York Times). Then as that claim was put to practical scrutiny the story changed. Now it became just four agencies.

Why should journalists have believed even that back-down story? After all, aren’t we talking about agencies that came out strongly with the story of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction years ago?

What’s more there is respectable technical evidence that there never was a DNC hack in the first place. Technical forensics instead point to a local download from the server, not a hack from afar. That suggests it was an internal leak not a hack.

If officials lie and distort to make their case, they exhibit an absence of integrity in my view. They deserve a presumption of disbelief instead of the gullible acceptance they are getting from most Americans.

The First Amendment forbids “abridging the freedom of speech” irrespective of whether there’s any truth to what one is saying. That gives our politicians license to spew utter nonsense upon an unsuspecting public. Many do that with abandon. They have a perfect right to sully their own reputation and character.

But how will anyone know they’re talking nonsense?

That’s where the next phrase in the First Amendment comes in. It nixes legislating against the “freedom of the press.” In practice, though, the media has less latitude for wanton fibbing.

That’s because of the implicit role of the press in a democracy. If not for an honest watch dog press how could citizens make enlightened choices at election time? Freedom of the press therefore is a right of the people to learn the truth. It’s not just free speech for journalists. Sure there’s room for wide-ranging opinions to be carried by the press. But when it comes to hard news, honest facts come first.

How could so many media outlets go off the deep end with basically the same slanted story about Manafort? Why didn’t they simply play it down the middle and just report the facts? I’ll tell you how this happened: nobody fact checked.

That’s an industry-wide problem in the media business. Bad practices cast a pale upon the whole journalistic profession. In Editors Only, a publication read by thousands of magazine and newspaper editors monthly, I recently gave this admonition: “Our collective reputation as providers of trustworthy content is at stake. The sins of others can impact our whole industry.”

Clearly it’s time for the media to shape up. The Manafort reportage makes that plain.

Russian Expansionism is a Consequence of GeographyGlobal Security Review… its western allies as a strategic threat. The incorporation of Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states into the Soviet Union, along with the creation of buffer states in Eastern Europe like Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, bolstered Russia’s…

Seven years after civil war erupted in 2011, it appears Syria is beginning to emerge from a dark period of death and destruction. Any recovery may be hampered, however, by what analysts say are signs of a crisis that is looming over water and how it is managed, which could mean the difference between peace or new conflicts — internal and regional — in the future. Land along the Euphrates River, which runs through modern-day Turkey, Syria and Iraq — also known historically as the Fertile Crescent — has been hit by water shortages, drought, and poor crop yields. To increase hydro-electric production and improve irrigation in arid parts of Anatolia, Turkey began building a series of 23 dams starting in the 1980s, reducing the amount of water that could be used for agriculture downstream in Syria and Iraq. Turkish leaders unilaterally annulled a water-sharing agreement with both Syria and Iraq in 2014. “They were supposed to allow 500 cubic meters per second of water through to the Euphrates and they reduced that down to 200 meters,” Marcus King, a specialist on environmental security at George Washington University in Washington, told VOA. Decreased flow from Turkey, seven years of fighting, and mismanagement of water resources in many parts of the country, have hit farming hard in Syria. A severe drought from 2006 to 2010 also caused tens of thousands of Syrians to give up agriculture, creating an army of idle young men that may have helped ignite the conflict that began in 2011. Joshua Landis, who heads the Middle East program at the University of Oklahoma, said the four-year drought “caused immense suffering in Syria,” and forced more than a million people to leave their farms in eastern Syria and to migrate to cities or the edge of cities. “It was that population,” Landis said, “that in many ways laid the groundwork for civil war.” The drawn-out conflict has damaged or destroyed water networks and infrastructure in Syria’s two largest cities, Aleppo and Damascus, as well as in the provinces. Militant groups that controlled water plants and reservoirs upstream periodically used those assets to blackmail their opponents in urban areas. “There have been various sub-national actors [who] have monopolized water for their own purposes, mismanaged water,” said King. He argues the Kurds, who hold sway over large swathes of northern and eastern Syria, control large segments of the Euphrates River, including the Tabqa Dam and Lake Assad. Observers say the Syrian government did not allocate water resources equally to all regions of the country before the war, giving more to some sectarian groups, such as President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite sect. To avoid future conflicts, he says, the government must avoid favoritism when it rebuilds and repairs its water network. “If the reconstruction isn’t done in an equitable way, this will lead to further tensions and cleavages within Syria itself as it begins to recover from conflict,” King said. Syrian analyst Nabil al-Samman agrees. In a recent article in the Saudi-owned Asharq al-Awsat newspaper, he wrote that water could be the catalyst for future conflicts between regional states, including Syria and Turkey. Syria and Turkey already fought a long guerilla war, starting in the 1970s, using the Kurdish PKK militia group as a proxy. Joshua Landis recalls that former Syrian President Hafez al- Assad “gave [Abdallah] Ocelan, the PKK leader, an office in Damascus and helped the Kurds in their insurgency in [Turkey’s] eastern Anatolia,” he said. “That [was] a war and it was done in part because Turkey began to dam up the Euphrates, and Assad was angry and he did not know how to get them to stop.” Recognizing that empty reservoirs and parched land are a threat to all people, the United Nations voted in 2010 to make access to water a human right, and most nations now resort to international law to mediate water disputes That option broke down, though, as regional powers entered the fray of Syria’s civil war, when the country’s many militia groups, often armed and supported by neighboring countries, preferred force over negotiations. Going forward, Marcus King worries more about internal than external conflict for Syria. “What worries me,” he said, “is some of the sub-national factors, some of the internal inequities and cleavages and disagreements that could lead to conflicts over water.” Tempering concerns about the frictions between Turkey and Syria, King and others note the last war fought exclusively over water in the Levant dates back to antiquity, and he doubts a new one is likely.

Iran will maintain its military presence in Syria despite U.S. pressure for its withdrawal, a senior Iranian official said on Tuesday, revealing more details about a military cooperation deal that Tehran and Damascus signed this week. Iranian Defense Minister Amir Hatami visited Damascus on Saturday for talks with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and senior military officials. He signed a deal for military cooperation in a meeting with his Syrian counterpart, but details of the accord were not revealed. “The continued presence of Iranian [military] advisers in Syria was part of this military cooperation agreement between Tehran and Damascus,” the state news agency IRNA quoted Tehran’s military attache to Damascus, Abolqassem Alinejad, as saying. “Iran will help Syria in clearing minefields in different parts of the country… Iran will help Syria to rebuild the military factories that were damaged in the war,” Alinejad said. Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have sent weapons and thousands of soldiers to Syria to help shore up Assad during the seven-year-long civil war there. U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton reiterated last week Washington’s call for Iran to remove all its forces from Syria. The United States has reimposed economic sanctions against Iran partly over its involvement in conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Yemen as well as over its nuclear and missile programs. Israel has also long called for its arch foe Iran to withdraw from its neighbor Syria. The Israeli air force has carried out scores of air strikes against Iran’s allies there. “The pact between Syria and Iran for rehabilitating the Assad army is an excuse and a facade meant to grant legitimacy to the Iranian forces remaining in the area,” Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan told Ynet TV on Tuesday. “But as far as we are concerned, no machinations keeping the Iranians in the area will be acceptable.” A senior Israeli official said in an anonymous statement to reporters that Israel’s military “will continue to act with full determination against attempts by Iran to transfer military forces and weapons systems to Syria.” Iran has repeatedly said its military presence in Syria is at the invitation of the Assad government and that it has no immediate plans to withdraw. More than 1,000 Iranians, including senior members of the elite Revolutionary Guards, have been killed in Syria since 2012. The Guards initially kept quiet about their role in Syria. But in recent years as casualties have mounted they have been more outspoken, framing their engagement as an existential struggle against Sunni Muslim fighters of Islamic State who see Shi’ites that form Iran’s majority as apostates.

What if Trump Did Actually Shoot Someone on Fifth Avenue?New York TimesThere are other parallels between Trumpism and Putinism: the glorification of oil, gas and mining over science and technology; the elevation of white, Christian, nationalist values; and the neutering of the legislative branch — today’s G.O.P …

An estimated 2,975 people died in the six months after Hurricane Maria as a result of the storm, with the elderly and impoverished most affected, according to a long-awaited independent study ordered by the U.S. territory’s government that was released Tuesday. The findings contrast sharply with the official death toll of 64, and are about double the government’s previous interim estimate of 1,400 deaths. Researchers with The Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University said the official death count from the Category 4 storm that hit on Sept. 20 was low in part because physicians were not trained on how to certify deaths after a disaster. There was a 22 percent overall increase in the number of deaths from September 2017 to February 2018 compared to previous years in the same time period, Lynn Goldman, dean of the institute, told reporters. “We are hopeful that the government will accept this as an official death toll,” she said. The office of Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello did not immediately return a message for comment. The study noted that mortality in Puerto Rico had been slowly decreasing since 2010, but spiked after the hurricane. About 40 percent of Puerto Rico’s 78 municipalities saw a significantly higher number of deaths in the six months after the storm compared with the previous two years, researchers said. These municipalities were located mostly in the island’s northeast and southwest regions. Researchers found that the risk of death was 45 percent higher for those living in impoverished communities, and that men older than 65 saw a continuous elevated risk of death. They also stated that physicians and others told them that Puerto Rico’s government did not notify them about federal guidelines on how to document deaths related to a major disaster. “Others expressed reluctance to relate deaths to hurricanes due to concern about the subjectivity of this determination and about liability,” the report stated. Researchers said they took into account an 8 percent drop in Puerto Rico’s population that occurred from September 2017 to mid-February 2018, when tens of thousands fled the damage left by the storm.

The German government is considering providing emergency financial assistance to Turkey as concerns grow in Berlin that a full-blown economic crisis could destabilize the region, German and European officials said.

Disclaimer and Clarification for our most studious and brightest FBI investigators: this title is the literary device of irony, not a call to violence. So give your new “carpetas” the correct tags and labels, dance ethically and esthetically, keep your guns securely holstered, and do not drink too much. Are they able or willing to understand the difference? Hopefully, they kapish. They are not that dumb. Hopefully. Most importantly, address the issues.

The German government is offering back up for security forces in the Eastern state of Saxony. This after the second night of rioting over the killing of a German man in an altercation with migrants, sparking full blown riots on Monday evening.

Despite claims from former FBI director James Comey to the opposite, hundreds of thousands of former-Rep. Anthony Weiner’s correspondences were reportedly not examined for potentially classified information as part of the agency’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.

Only 3,077 of the nearly 700,000 emails discovered on a laptop Weiner shared with wife and top Clinton staffer Huma Abedin were reviewed, according to a report from RealClearInvestigations. The examination was done during a marathon 12-hour session the day before Comey said Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, should not be recommended for criminal charges.

The search that was completed uncovered additional instances of Clinton transmitting and receiving classified information via her private, unauthorized email account, according to one U.S. law enforcement official.

President Trump tweeted about the findings on Saturday, threatening to interject himself into an investigation into corruption at the FBI.

“Big story out that the FBI ignored tens of thousands of Crooked Hillary Emails, many of which are REALLY BAD. Also gave false election info. I feel sure that we will soon be getting to the bottom of all of this corruption. At some point I may have to get involved!,” he posted.

Top Clinton allies say Comey’s controversial decision to reopen the email investigation weeks before the election following the discovery of Weiner’s laptop was a key reason why Trump won in a surprise victory.

Weiner, who last year was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison for sending lewd messages to a minor, did not have security clearance but reportedly received classified information on his personal email account on two occasions.

The German government is considering providing emergency financial assistance to Turkey as concerns grow in Berlin that a full-blown economic crisis could destabilize the region, German and European officials said.

WASHINGTON, February 2. /TASS/. Washington has suspended its entry ban for Russian security chiefs, so that they could travel to the United States for consultations with their US colleagues, US Department of State Spokesperson Heather Nauert said.

The director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergey Naryshkin, Federal Security Service (FSB) chief Alexander Bortnikov and chief the Russian General Staff’s Main Intelligence Directorate Igor Korobov visited Washington last week, according to US media reports.

“I can tell you in a general – in a general matter, if something is considered to be in the national security interest of the United States, just like other countries, we have the ability to waive that so that people can come in to the United States,” Nauert said.

“It is no secret that despite our many, many differences <…> with the Russian Government, we also have areas where we have to work together, and one of those is combating terrorism and ISIS (Islamic State terrorist group, outlawed in Russia),” she continued.

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The spokesperson gave no details about the visit, saying that information regarding visa decisions is protected under the US law.

“I know it’s a matter that’s frustrating to a lot of reporters – visa applications and those types of things are something that we are not able to discuss. That is considered private information under the federal law. Like it or not, that is just the law and so we have to adhere to that,” she said.

The United States has earlier imposed unilateral sanctions, which include entry ban, on Naryshkin, Bortnikov and Korobov, along with other senior Russian officials.

Russia’s military intelligence agency, known as the GRU‍, is getting blamed for all sorts of things these days. Robert Mueller indicted 12 GRU officers for hacking into computers of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The GRU allegedly was behind the recent poisonings of four peoplein Britain, including former GRU officer Sergei Skripal, who survived, and a woman accidentally exposed to the powerful nerve agent used, who died.

The 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine has been laid at the door of the GRU. And recently there were reports that GRU hackers are directing their efforts at the U.S. power grid. Russian mercenaries serving in Syria and in Africa are largely drawn from GRU ranks. Three Russian journalists investigating their activities were murdered last month.

Igor Korobov, the head of the GRU, was singled out personally for U.S. Treasury sanctions in March, along with his organization, even though he had already been sanctioned by the Obama administration in late 2016 for interference in our elections.

Maybe Trump’s people felt they had to make the point after Korobov was invited, along with chiefs of other Russian secret services, to Washington, D.C., in late January—just weeks before the new sanctions were announced. The visit was supposed to be a secret, but the Russians leaked it. The others in attendance were Sergei Naryshkin, the head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and Aleksandr Bortnikov, director of the Federal Security Service (FSB).

“It was necessary to look each other in the eye and talk about issues that threaten us and the Americans.”

Steven Hall, a former CIA station chief in Moscow, told Radio Free Europe it is always considered a “big political win” when a Russian spy chief meets one-on-one with his U.S. counterpart, because it puts them on equal footing.

The intelligence chiefs reportedly discussed with the Americans their mutual struggle against global terrorism, but it would be remarkable if the talks were limited to that subject. As a veteran of the FSB explained to a TV audience in Russia, “Many questions cannot be discussed by phone. It was necessary to look each other in the eye and talk about issues that threaten us and the Americans.”

Hall had a different take: “Given the political conditions in the United States now, it’s flabbergasting, to be honest. I can’t imagine who would have signed off on that.”

At home in Russia meanwhile, Korobov is riding high. In 2017, conceivably for his work helping to get Trump elected, Korobov was promoted to colonel-general, and Putin bestowed on him the highest state honor—Hero of the Russian Federation.

It is hard to believe that just a few years ago there was widespread talk in the Russian media about the GRU being on its last legs, perhaps even about to be disbanded. In November 2010, at a celebration of the anniversary of the founding of the GRU in 1918, GRU officers one after another toasted mournfully “to the bright memory” of their agency. The new 70,000-square-meter GRU headquarters, built in 2006 on Khoroshevskoye Shosse, was emptying out, they said.

By one estimate, of the 7,000 GRU officers working in the Soviet era, only 2,000 remained. This included a 40-percent reduction among GRU staff at foreign embassies. The GRU’s famed special combat brigades, the so-called Spetsnaz units, supposedly were going to be transferred to the regular army.

Lt. Gen. Dmitry Gerasimov, who had directed the GRU’s special-purpose brigades, told The New Times: “I am deeply convinced that the GRU special forces are completely devastated. Of the 14 brigades and two GRU training regiments, at best there are not more than four brigades left.” There was also talk of placing GRU signals intelligence systems under the command of the SVR, the foreign intelligence service.

“The chaos in Ukraine was a boon for the GRU.”

— Mark Galeotti, War on the Rocks

There were several reasons for the GRU’s decline. In the 2008 conflict with the Republic of Georgia, it failed to alert the Russian military that Georgia had received anti-aircraft missiles from Ukraine. Moreover, in Moscow’s intramural spy-vs.-spy rivalries, the GRU had its own channel of information on corruption and money-laundering by the Russian elite that represented a threat to the interests of the FSB and SVR.

According to this analysis, there was a shadow intelligence network, consisting of a clan close to Putin from the FSB, the SVR, and the regular police that was running the country. And this group did not like having a competitor agency capable of independent comparative analysis. Significantly, the chiefs of both the FSB and the SVR sit on Putin’s National Security Council, but not the GRU head, who reports only to the armed forces general staff.

Miraculously, however, the GRU bounced back after Igor Sergun became chief of the agency in 2011. According to security expert Mark Galeotti, writing in War on the Rocks, Sergun was “an able, articulate, and effective champion of his agency’s interests… He was particularly good at managing relations with Putin and those to whom the president listens.”

Sergun managed to have several Spetsnaz units transferred back to the GRU. These troops are roughly comparable to U.S. special operations forces. They perform reconnaissance, diversion, and combat operations in various hot spots where there is ethnic strife, such as Chechnya, where they were widely deployed.

Then came the Crimean invasion and the Ukrainian conflict.

As Galeotti pointed out: “The chaos in Ukraine was a boon for the GRU, which was one of the lead agencies both in the seizure of the Crimea in 2014 and the subsequent destabilization of the Donbas [Eastern Ukraine]. If the future means more ‘hybrid war’ operations, more interactions with warlords, gangsters, and insurgents, then this is much more the forte of the GRU than the SVR.”

Some members of GRU units became mercenaries in private military companies like the Wagner Group, under the command of reserve GRU Lt. Col. Dmitry Utkin. In 2014-15 Wagner was one of the main forcesin battles fought on the territories of Donetsk and Lugansk in eastern Ukraine. Subsequently Wagner moved to Syria, where it has played a vital role as the Kremlin’s proxy force supporting Syrian government military offensives.

When some of its operatives were involved in an attack on oil installations controlled by U.S. allies on the ground, the Americans counterattacked from the air, allegedly killing several Wagner personnel. In April, a Russian reporter writing about Wagner operations and casualties died under mysterious circumstances, supposedly falling accidentally from the balcony of his fifth floor apartment.

“The order to fire the missile was approved by GRU Gen. Oleg Vladimirovich Ivannikov.”

Wagner also runs significant operations as far afield as the Central African Republic, where it bolsters government forces, negotiates with rebels, and guards valuable diamond, gold, and other mineral deposits—activities being investigated by the Russian journalists murdered there.

These ad hoc GRU operations have had some negative repercussions for Moscow. A joint Australian and Dutch investigation determined that the missile used to down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July 2014 originated from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile brigade, a unit of the Russian army from Kursk in the Russian Federation. The respected Bellingcat group has now found that the order to fire the missile was approved by GRU Gen. Oleg Vladimirovich Ivannikov, who supervised several divisions of fighters in Donetsk, including those of Ukrainian separatists and the Wagner Group.

Korobov got off to a rocky start when he assumed the post of GRU chief in early 2016. For starters, there were questions raised about the sudden death in January that year of his predecessor, Sergun.

Officially, Sergun died of natural causes in Moscow, but there were reports that he perished in Lebanon. The decision to appoint Korobov took an entire month, reportedly because of a conflict within the Kremlin elite over who should get the job from a choice of four candidates. A group that was allied with the FSB and the SVR, led by Sergei Ivanov (then head of the presidential administration and an old KGB colleague of Putin), wanted one of their own to head the GRU, while those representing Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu were pushing for Korobov.

The army clan, proponents of an aggressive, confrontational approach toward the West in Ukraine and elsewhere, won out, and within several months Ivanov would lose his Kremlin job.

It is said that Korobov, who specialized in strategic military intelligence, is a pragmatist who is not interested in Kremlin politics and just wants to get the job done, whatever that might be. So it must be unsettling for Korobov to be the only high-level Russian official with staff members under indictment in the United States.

In fact, back in 2006, at the opening of the new GRU headquarters, a journalist asked a GRU generalwhether U.S. elections were a topic that was followed by their intelligence analysts. The general responded, “That is primarily a task for the SVR. We follow [the elections] but to a much lesser extent than the SVR.””

So how to explain that 12 years later the GRU is in the forefront of election meddling in the U.S.?

According to Vadim Birstein, an authority on the Russian security services, “In the past, the ‘active measures’ deployed for decades by the KGB/SVR against the West referred mainly to HUMINT (human intelligence) and disinformation campaigns in the media, rather than cyber warfare operations which are a new level in intelligence wars.”

Although the SVR has cyber weapons—and in fact was reported to be behind the initial 2015 attack on the DNC under the guise of “Cozy Bear”—the GRU, Birstein says, “has more technical resources to conduct operations like those described in the Mueller indictment.”

A persistent question is how Mueller’s team got the information detailed in the indictment. As Alexei Venediktov, editor of Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow) radio, noted: “When you read parts of the indictment you just freak out. Because they [Mueller’s team] know everything—time, place, login, password, career. And this supposedly just by remote methods.” As Venediktov and others say, the FBI must have had insider information.

Where did the leak come from? Putin obviously wants to know. When he spoke at a news conference with Trump in Helsinki on July 16, he suggested that Russia and the U.S. cooperate in the investigation by having members of Mueller’s team come to Russia and take part in questioning the GRU officers. (As The Daily Beast reported, this is not nearly as generous as it sounds. When British investigators looking into the murder of former Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko went to Moscow, they found themselves thwarted and put under surveillance.)

“With Putin everything is personal.”

— Marina Litvinenko, widow of murdered Alexander Litvinenko

Although it is the job of the FSB, as a counterintelligence agency, to find spies and potential traitors within the military, there is some speculation that FSB officers passed information about the GRU’s hacking operations to American intelligence.

Back in December 2016, by which time the GRU had been exposed, some high-level FSB officers in the FSB’s cybersecurity unit were arrested and charged with treason. (One, Sergei Mikhailov, was physically removed from a meeting with a black sack over his head.) The treason case has been kept a closely guarded secret, but Russian insiders suggest that Mikhailov and his colleagues were motivated by the long-standing rivalry between the FSB and the GRU to betray the GRU. According to some sources, money was also a motive.

Of course, the GRU is no stranger to defections and international scandal. The first major spy case to erupt after World War II, igniting the Cold War, occurred in 1945 when a GRU cipher clerk from the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa defected, taking with him reams of secret documents that showed the Soviets had an atomic spy ring in North America.

Then there was the infamous GRU Gen. Oleg Penkovsky, who tipped off Britain that the Soviets had missiles in Cuba—and was executed for treason in 1963. Much later, Sergei Skripal, who for several years cooperated with MI6, provided hundreds of names of his fellow GRU agents before he was caught in 2006 and charged with treason. In 2010 he was handed over to Britain as part of a spy swap, and earlier this year he was poisoned.

British authorities are now saying that the GRU carried out the U.K. murder attempt on Skripal, apparently because Skripal betrayed the agency. Investigators reportedly have evidence that the GRU hacked into the email of Skripal’s daughter, Yulia. But revenge against traitors is traditionally up to the FSB. Recall that the 2006 poisoning of Litvinenko in London, shown by the British High Court Inquiry to be the work of the FSB, was preceded by the July 2006 enactment of a new Russian law that specifically authorized the FSB to carry out assassinations abroad.

But maybe we in the West should stop trying to figure out which Russian security service has been doing what to us. After all, the buck stops in the Kremlin. Putin is a hands-on leader—a KGB veteran himself—who calls the shots on just about everything from assassinations of alleged traitors to revenge against Western politicians he resents, like Hillary Clinton. As the widow of Alexander Litvinenko told me once, “with Putin everything is personal.”

The State photographs show 65-year-old Putin on a weekend break to the Tuva region

Vladimir Putin has done his best Bear Grylls impression in a series of shots released by the Kremlin from his hiking holiday.

The Russian leader has been enjoying himself on holiday in Siberia with his defence minister and the head of the Federal Security Service,the FSB in the Tuva region of southern Siberia over the weekend.

The photographs show 65-year-old Putin showing off his more intrepid side and posing in a khaki outfit and hat, carrying binoculars and trekking poles and hiking in forested mountains for a series of posed shots.

Previous outdoor snapshots of Putin on holiday released by the state, including images of him fishing and sunbathing shirtless, appear intended to demonstrate his robust physical health and vigour as he wrestles with the affairs of the country.

Putin took the break on his way to the Siberian city of Kemerovo, a coal mining hub, where he attended a meeting with government officials and top managers of energy companies on Monday.

“The president, on his way to Kemerovo, decided to fly out earlier and spend Saturday and Sunday in Tuva, on the Yenisei River. He walked in the mountains, admired the beautiful views,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

Vladimir Putin has done his best Bear Grylls impression in a series of shots … Federal Security Service Alexander Bortnikov are pictured bird-watching in … Sergei Shoigu in studying a coniferous sapling, ready for planting.

… Putin and Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu are studying a coniferous sapling, … In another, Putin and FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov stand in a forest … Putin took the break on his way to the Siberian city of Kemerovo, a coal …

A picture taken on August 26, 2018, shows Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu (R) looking at vegetation during a short vacation in the remote Tuva region in southern Siberia. Alexey Nikolsky / AFP

MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin typically seeks out exciting, rugged, sometimes shirtless activities on his summer vacations. This year he was more laid back.

One summer Putin took a dive in the Black Sea only to allegedly discover an ancient amphora. Another time he galloped on a horse bare-chested across a mountain creek.

A picture taken on August 26, 2018, shows Russian President Vladimir Putin walking during a short vacation in the remote Tuva region in southern Siberia. Alexey Nikolsky / AFP

This year Russia’s 65-year-old leader returned to one of his favourite holiday spots: the far-flung wilderness of Siberia’s remote Tyva region.

In this photo taken on Saturday, Aug. 25, 2018 and released by Kremlin press service on Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin sits inside a boat on Yenisey river during a mini-break in the Siberian Tyva region, Russia. Putin’s spokesman said on Monday that the Russian president spent the weekend in Russia’s far-flung Tuva region in the company of the defense minister and the chief of the domestic intelligence. Alexei Nikolsky / AFP

Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Monday that Putin spent last weekend hiking in the mountains and taking in the views with Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and the head of Russia’s main intelligence agency, FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov.

In this photo taken on Sunday, Aug. 26, 2018 and released by Kremlin press service on Monday, Aug. 27, 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, speaks to Director of Sayano-Shushenskiy State Biospheric Nature Reserve Gennady Kiselev during a mini-break in the Siberian Tyva region, Russia. Putin’s spokesman said on Monday that the Russian president spent the weekend in Russia’s far-flung Tuva region in the company of the defense minister and the chief of the domestic intelligence. Alexei Nikolsky / AFP

Photos released by the Kremlin showed Putin hiking, examining plants with Shoigu and riding in a boat on the Yenisey River.

The International Committee is needed to investigate the status, the activities, the moda operandi, the operations and their mechanisms, of the German Military Intelligence, the Abwehr, after the WW2.

They did not go into the non-existence and the oblivion quietly and readily, not at all. They transformed themselves into the very effective “peacetime” weapon. Hitler lost the War in 1945, Canaris won it (symbolically, and with the certain reservations, of course) fifty years later, in the mid- 1990-s, after the dissolution of the USSR and the reunification of Germany.

It is possible that they celebrated this “Victory” with the symbolic, performance like operations “Trump” and “9/11”.

McCarthy and McCarthyism (“muckcart“, they just love using the “telling”, symbolic names as the means of broadcasting and communications, for those who are supposed to understand) have very strong clues and indications that it might have been the elaborated, very well planned and designed, influence and propaganda operation by the post-WW2 Abwehr. Historically, McCarthyism coincides with the momentous events in the USSR: death of Stalin and de-Stalinization (Khrushchev’s secret speech of 1956). The operation “Muck Cart” – McCarthyism was used to dispose of the bunch of the former and present “Communist opponents”, who were carefully spied on, researched, and, finally “de-activated” and neutralized by Abwehr, in addition to the very clear geopolitical benefits for Germany.

No one person and no one country would be able to investigate these and other related and relevant hypotheses by themselves. The International Committee, with the broad investigative and the executive powers, might be the most suitable and viable solution.

This issues: “Abwehr” and its operations after the WW2 have to be addressed in fullest.

Admiral Canaris screams from his grave: “I am not a traitor! I did it for Germany!”

The culture of the Intelligence Institutions, and such legends as Abwehr in particular, perpetuates itself relentlessly through generations. The Abwehr agents became the biological-genetic, ideological, cultural, secret military, live weapon, self-sustaining, autonomous, and procreating. The design of the Genius, in his field. The product of the complex, rich, contradictory, and the extraordinary mind of Admiral Canaris.

The Abwehr boys are proud. They leave their signature clues, deliberately. For those who will be able to understand. They want their credit due, as the “good German boys” and “good soldiers”.

The World is silent and confused. The World needs to understand. The World needs to investigate.

Mueller probe plunders New York tabloid swampPoliticoMueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election is forcing the special counsel and his colleagues to wade into a New York tabloid swamp, a habitat where outlandish behavior flourishes, particularly if it’s …

But if the Senator was macho and angry, Washington’s mood in the 1950’s under the fatherly President Dwight D. Eisenhower was rather flaccid. Some of the liberal intellectuals on the fringes of the Government were going through their famous agony of conscience about the Soviet Government. When Senator McCarthy fulminated about loyalty, there were some people who asked themselves, loyalty to what? It was an emotional word applied to an intellectual decision. In some circles, ambivalence toward our Government, even our country, had come to be regarded as a civil right.

Though Mr. Oshinsky does his best to be fair to McCarthy, the Senator inevitably emerges as the bad guy in ”A Conspiracy So Immense.” He hurt people, disrupted the Government and disgraced us in the eyes of other countries. But if he was the bad guy, it is not so easy to find the good guys in the story of those years. President Eisenhower was not commanding, brave or tactically ingenious in dealing with the Senator from Wisconsin. Both John and Robert F. Kennedy maintained a discreet detachment after an initial period of friendship with McCarthy. And everybody else seemed reluctant to tangle with a man who was a master at dirty fighting.

There are few periods in our history when our Federal Government seemed so impotent. Even the indefatigable Mr. Oshinsky cannot fully explain why no coalition or group was formed to bring the Senator under control. It was as if he were a drunk misbehaving at a party where everyone was too polite to throw him out.

Though what we call psychohistory has not been conspicuously successful, it does seem as though Mr. McCarthy’s case cries out for some sort of psychological speculation. He apparently had no further political ambitions, but because his incessant attacks won him at least as many enemies as friends, it would seem that the answer to his behavior lay buried in his personality. One wishes Mr. Oshinsky had allowed himself to speculate a little more in this direction.

Though we all followed the story of Senator McCarthy’s rise and fall on television and in newspapers and magazines, it still makes very vivid reading in Mr. Oshinsky’s capable hands. There’s even an element of pathos in the way the Senator went down to defeat. It was his mysterious loyalty to his assistant Roy Cohn that led to the censure vote that effectively ended his career. This loyalty didn’t make him noble – just consistent or stubborn or arrogant.

Whatever his faults, though, he taught us something about ourselves. In some ways, we may be soft – not necessarily about Communism, or any other ism – but about political realities. And perhaps this is inevitable, a doubt or hesitation built into the democratic process. If this is the case, it’s a valuable lesson for us to learn.

In early March, President Trump sent four tweets accusing his predecessor of wiretapping the phones in Trump Tower in the months before the 2016 election. The tweets were just the latest manifestation of Trump’s preoccupation with eavesdropping and surveillance—one that can be traced back decades. As BuzzFeed’s Aram Roston reported last summer, during the mid-two-thousands, Trump kept a telephone console in his bedroom at his Mar-a-Lago resort, in Palm Beach, that allowed him to listen in on phone calls between his employees and, sometimes, staff and guests. (Trump denied this.) In the mid-nineteen-eighties, Trump allowed Tony Schwartz, his ghostwriter, to listen in on his private phone calls with bankers, lawyers, and developers, as Schwartz wrote “The Art of the Deal.” And, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, many of Trump’s private conversations with his late mentor, the lawyer Roy Cohn, were eavesdropped on by Cohn’s longtime switchboard operator and courier, whose activities were later exposed.

Cohn, who had been an aide to Senator Joe McCarthy, in the nineteen-fifties, was a political fixer and lawyer who represented New York power brokers, from the Yankees owner George Steinbrenner to the mob boss Carlo Gambino. Trump was one of his favorite clients; before Cohn’s death, of AIDS-related complications, in 1986, the two men talked up to five times a day and partied together at Studio 54 and other night clubs. “Roy was brutal, but he was a very loyal guy,” Trump told the writer Tim O’Brien, in 2005. “He brutalized for you.”

Christine Seymour had recently graduated from Sarah Lawrence College when she started working at the back of Cohn’s office as a switchboard operator, connecting calls with clients including Nancy Reagan, Gloria Vanderbilt, and the mobsters Gambino and Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno. “She listened in to all of them,” Susan Bell, Cohn’s longtime secretary, recalled recently. “Not at his direction, but he knew.” A pretty brunette, Seymour was, according to her brothers, brash and funny, with a gossipy sense of humor. Cohn had his reasons for tolerating her behavior. “She was very efficient, and he liked that about her,” Bell said. “She would work anytime, day or night. She was always at his beck and call.”

After Cohn died and his law firm dissolved, Seymour left the city and moved to Florida. She settled in Key Colony Beach, a sleepy town at the bottom of the Keys, where, in the early nineties, she started writing a book, “Surviving Roy Cohn,” based on her notes on the eavesdropped calls. It must have seemed an ideal moment for a project that promised to take the reader inside the town house of one of the most scandalous figures in recent New York history. In 1993, James Woods was nominated for an Emmy for his portrayal of Cohn in an HBO biopic, “Citizen Cohn,” and “Angels in America,” Tony Kushner’s play dramatizing Cohn’s struggle with AIDS, had débuted to acclaim on Broadway.

On the morning of May 5, 1994, the New York Post ran a column by Cindy Adams with the headline “Savvy Chris Spills the Beans on Roy Cohn.” In her characteristically breezy manner, Adams wrote about Seymour’s book project, listing the secrets she would expose. (“How a porno flick was filmed in the office and business was conducted while someone was being whipped”; “How Sen. Joe McCarthy hid the fact that he was gay. . . .”) “Chris taped conversations,” she wrote. “She kept a log—three spiral notebooks a day—of transactions.” Adams wrote that Seymour “monitored every call in or out, knew everything, everyone, knew where all the bodies were buried.” The story ricocheted through the city, and Cohn’s former law partners and staffers received phone calls from several other anxious clients, worried that their secrets would be revealed.

Five months later, on October 20, 1994, Seymour was driving her blue two-door Yugo on a highway in Florida at dusk when she collided head-on with a tractor-trailer and was instantly killed. She was forty-six, and the book was still unfinished. Seymour’s collaborator on the book, an author and literary agent named Jeffrey Schmidt, was at home on Long Island when he got the call from Seymour’s mother, Adele, who lived in nearby Shoreham. As he recalled recently, on hearing the news of Seymour’s death, he panicked, took a box of the notebooks, and burned them.

As for the recordings, none of Cohn’s former employees can confirm that Christine made any. But Christine’s brother, Brian, who once worked as a crew member on Cohn’s eighty-foot yacht, Defiance, told me that when Christine moved to Florida, she had handed him three small reel-to-reel tapes that she claimed she had made. The tapes were, he recalled, “in god-awful shape, spooled and unspooled and crinkled.” He stored them in his mother’s attic, where he later found them, in 2009, after she passed away. “We just tossed them in the trash,” he told me. In the spring of 1995, Schmidt told the syndicated columnist Liz Smith that some tapes still existed and would soon be the basis for a Broadway musical, written by Seymour and Schmidt, with music by Jeanette Cooper. “Nothing Sacred” is really Seymour’s story; her eavesdropping is at the heart of the drama. The play kicks off with Cohn’s voice “heard over the telephone wire.” On one of her first days, she tells a colleague that Cohn is on the phone with Nancy Reagan, adding, “Oh, I wish I could hear what they’re saying.” The office manager replies, “Go ahead and listen. Roy doesn’t mind.” Later, she adds, “Some of the most important conversations of the twentieth century have come through the switchboard. And they’re all on tape.” One of the first songs includes the line, “This damn phone, needs a chaperone / Someone who’ll defend, the fortress of a friend / In exchange she’ll learn things she would never know.” After one staged reading of “Nothing Sacred,” in the winter of 1997, at the Dicapo Opera Theatre, on the Upper East Side, Schmidt got caught up in other projects, he said, and the play was never produced.

Schmidt still lives in Stony Brook, on Long Island, where he runs NYCreative Management, a literary agency. Last September, we met at the Strand one afternoon and then walked across the street for a cup of coffee. It was a warm afternoon, but Schmidt was wearing a black suit with a bright yellow tie. He handed me a yellow packing envelope, containing “some things left behind in Roy’s office.” Inside the envelope were several floppy disks, a cassette tape, the “Nothing Sacred” screenplay, a 1981 invitation to a Ronald Reagan Presidential Inauguration party, the consent form to participate in an AIDS drug trial, a few faded photographs, and dozens of notes, some of them stained, written in Seymour’s hasty longhand. The notes contain lists of the clients who called Cohn’s office, including their personal phone numbers; Seymour’s reminiscences of her experience working with Cohn, including lunch orders for pepper-sausage-and-mushroom pizza slices; and her description of Cohn’s conversations with Trump, Steinbrenner, Vanderbilt, and Nancy Reagan, among others, and what appear to be direct quotes from some of those phone calls—although it’s almost impossible to know how much of Seymour’s account in the notebooks and script is true.

Some of the Roy Cohn-related documents that are still in Jeffrey Schmidt’s possession, including the handwritten notes of Cohn’s switchboard operator, Christine Seymour. PHOTOGRAPH BY JOSÉ GINARTE FOR THE NEW YORKER

PHOTOGRAPH BY JOSÉ GINARTE FOR THE NEW YORKER

One of Seymour’s notes describes Cohn’s efforts to advance the judicial career of Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, who served as a federal appeals-court judge for decades, until stepping down soon after Trump assumed the Presidency: “Roy got the White House to give her her judgeship,” Seymour writes. “Roy was out and the call came in to tell her she got it. I took the call and called her to tell her. Ten minutes later, Donald called to say thank you.” (Barry did not respond to requests for comment.)

Seymour also describes some of Cohn’s political dirty tricks, including that he had researched Geraldine Ferraro, the 1984 Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, with the assistance of Trump’s adviser Roger Stone. (“Roger Stone—worked with Roy very heavily before and after elections. Was the one with Roy to find out the dirt on the Ferraros.”) Stone, who first met Trump through Cohn, initially did not think much of the brash young real-estate developer, Seymour’s notes indicate. “Roger did not like Donald Trump or his new house, told me they were losers, but if Roy used them, he would, too,” she writes. When I recently asked Stone about this, he said the “notes make no sense,” adding, “I was very impressed with Donald Trump when I met him.”

According to Seymour’s notes, Cohn’s frequent phone pals included Nancy Reagan and the former C.I.A. director William Casey, who “called Roy almost daily during [Reagan’s] 1st election.” Cohn also enlisted his friend and the owner of the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch, to help bring down Ferraro’s campaign: “Whenever Roy wanted a story stopped or item put in, or story exploited, i.e Ferraro—and her family, Roy called Murdoch.” Cohn killed stories that would hurt his friends. When he found out that “60 Minutes” was about to do a negative story about Reagan’s potential Vice-President, Senator Paul Laxalt, of Nevada, “Roy called the producer of 60 Minutes and asked him to take it off the schedule.” The longtime “60 Minutes” producer Lowell Bergman, who didn’t talk to Cohn himself, confirms that the story never aired amid pressure from lawyers, including Cohn.

Another note says, “Donald was the last one Roy spoke to on the phone,” perhaps referring to Cohn’s last days, in 1986. Seymour also noted that Trump could be “two-faced,” and described how he had once heard from an assistant that a lawyer working for Cohn wanted to leave his firm and immediately told Cohn about the treachery. Trump “did things like that always. Roy’s line on him: ‘He pisses ice water!’ ” It appears that Trump was aware of her eavesdropping; Seymour claims that Trump told Cohn that she was listening in on the phone calls. Seymour’s jottings also suggest that she had eavesdropped on the call between Cohn and his doctor on November 4, 1984, when Cohn was told that he had been diagnosed with AIDS. A poignant note records that, when he got the news, Cohn responded, “Should I commit suicide now or later?”

Some of Seymour’s claims in the notes are disputed by Bell, who says that Cohn rarely called the White House, though he was friendly with Nancy Reagan. Bell also doubts that Cohn’s last conversation was with Trump, who, she said, abandoned his lawyer when he found out that Cohn was H.I.V.-positive.“They were so close, they talked at least several times a week,” she said. “And as soon as he found out, he took all his cases away from Roy except for one and got new lawyers. After all they’d been through together.” But the notes, and the lingering mystery of what secrets were contained in the lost notebooks, continue to inspire rumors and, perhaps, a legacy of paranoia. Brian Seymour told me that Christine had a photographic memory, but he can’t say for sure what is true and what isn’t. “She probably knew a lot about a lot of things, but she’s not here anymore,” he said.

Joshua Fecker, 21, was arrested Thursday night at the Richmond Station after a BART police officer recognized him from a photo the transit agency had circulated during the day, according to BART.

Authorities received a report at 2:18 a.m. Thursday that a man was down with what appeared to be stab wounds to the chest and buttocks. The stabbing occurred on BART property after the Warm Springs Station had closed, officials said.

Chris Filippi, a BART spokesman, said the victim was at a hospital Friday morning and had been stabilized.

The stabbing came a month after the July 22 fatal stabbing of Nia Wilson at MacArthur Station in Oakland. Wilson’s sister was also injured in the unprovoked attack, which was the third homicide in a week on the BART system and led to an arrest.

BART police circulated Fecker’s photo Thursday to the public and other law enforcement agencies.

Filippi said the station’s cameras have been an invaluable “extra set of eyes” in tracking crime suspects as BART deals with an understaffed police force that has resulted in officers working mandatory overtime, six shifts a week.

“That’s just one of the reactions to what’s happened over the last few weeks,” Filippi said.

Michael Shrimpton, 57, is facing jail after being found guilty of phoning Parliament in April 2012 to say the Queen was the target of a nuclear attack

A barrister who claimed that German spies were plotting to attack the Queen with a nuclear weapon at the London Olympics has been found guilty of communicating false information.

Michael Shrimpton, 57, called a close colleague of former Defence Secretary Philip Hammond in April 2012 to say that a nuclear warhead had been stashed in an east London hospital and was going to be used to attack either the Queen, the Olympic Stadium, or the opening ceremony.

He also claimed his house in Wendover, Buckinghamshire, was a ‘bona fide’ HQ for an international intelligence network – but he is today facing jail after being found guilty at Southwark Crown Court.

A jury of nine men and three women found Shrimpton guilty of two counts of communicating false information after more than six hours of deliberation, with majority 11-1 verdicts.

Sentencing will take place in February of next year after Judge Alistair McCreath QC ordered that Shrimpton be sent for psychiatric evaluation.

Judge McCreath said: ‘The sentence that I pass upon you will have to reflect that gravity of the conduct of which you have been convicted.

‘But if, as may be the case, there is some underlying reason for it, then it seems to me important that I be informed of that underlying reason and I am therefore minded to order that you undergo psychiatric examination.’

Shrimpton, author of ‘Spyhunter: The Secret History of German Intelligence’, replied he had ‘no objection’ to the order.

In April 2012, just as preparations for the London Olympics were entering their final phase, Shrimpton contacted Barry Burton, the principal private secretary to Philip Hammond.

He told Mr Burton that spies from ‘a covert and rather sinister’ Germany agency had sabotaged Russian submarine Kursk, which sank in 2000, and stole four nuclear warheads.

The lawyer boasted of ‘credible European sources’, name-dropped members of parliament, and said intelligence had been blocked through official channels because the Germans had infiltrated MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.

During the 20-minute call Shrimpton said he had gathered intelligence from his own network of volunteers that one warhead was being stored in a hospital in London to avoid detection.

Mr Burton suspected that the call had been a hoax, but was forced to pass the information over to the Olympic security team and the police.

The following day Shrimpton phoned the Aylesbury Conservative Association and asked to speak with MP David Lidington about the threat, which he described as being in the style of American TV show ’24’.

The call was reported to a colleague at Parliament, and Shrimpton was arrested the same day.

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Shrimpton called a close colleague of then Defence Secretary Philip Hammond to say German spies had looted four nuclear warheads from a sunken Russia sub and were hiding one in London for the attack

Shrimpton claimed his arrest was a ‘colossal cock-up’, blamed the Germans and demanded a ‘nice lunch with MI5’.

In interview at Aylesbury police station he boasted he was a ‘national security specialist’ with hundreds of intelligence contacts who acted as a back channel between governments.

Representing himself at his two-week trial, he told jurors he worked on the investigation into Madeleine McCann’s disappearance and the case of Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet.

He read extracts from his address book with a number of ‘contacts’ in the CIA, FBI, MI6, the Pentagon, Chinese intelligence and Parliament.

Shrimpton said: ‘I admit that the stuff I deal with is bound to sound strange, high falutin, incredible and fantastic.It’s my world, welcome to my world.’

Shrimpton claimed he has rubbed shoulders with royalty, former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and listed a number of famous names including Richard Branson and Steven Forbes.

Giving evidence he boasted of meeting Prince Philip twice in a social context and claimed to have to Royal’s phone number.

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Shrimpton said the information had been blocked through official channels because the Germans had infiltrated MI5, MI6, and GCHQ (pictured, the Queen at the London 2012 opening ceremony)

Among his other claims were that he was consulted by the makers of TV show Spooks on his specialist knowledge, that the CIA had allowed him to enter the U.S. carrying a weapon, and that the LA Sheriff’s Department had discussed terror attacks with him over a cup of coffee.

He also insisted he has the authority to issue a Defence Advisory Notice on behalf of the government to stop British media from publishing stories that could compromise national security.

He said he wanted to prevent the News of the World from blowing his intelligence, and added they were ‘very cooperative’.

Shrimpton told jurors that there had been an assassination attempt against him by the Chinese authorities who wanted to ‘whack’ him.

In response, prosecutor Alan Blake said: ‘The information was extraordinary and dramatic, in essence Mr Shrimpton announced that a nuclear weapon stolen from the sunken Russian submarine the Kursk a number of years ago, that such a nuclear weapon had been smuggled into the UK and was being stored in a London hospital in preparation to be used during the Olympic games.

‘With the benefit of hindsight the information may seem outlandish, perhaps even laughable.

‘Before being too dismissive do recall the position in 2012 when those calls were made.’

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Sitting at Southwark Crown Court, Judge Alistair McCreath QC delayed sentencing for Shrimpton until February next year while the lawyer has psychiatric tests

At that stage, surface to air missiles had just been installed on the tops of a number of blocks of flats and it was feared terrorists could infiltrate G4S staff after the security company began frantically hiring after announcing a staff shortage, the court heard.

Mr Blake said Shrimpton was a ‘respected professional man’ who has ‘superficial plausibility’.

He added: ‘It is the prosecution’s case that the information provided by Mr Shrimpton was false and that when he communicated those threats he didn’t honestly or genuinely believe that they were true or rather knew or believed that they were false.’

Shrimpton was granted conditional bail ahead of sentencing on February 6.

Barrister and author Michael Shrimpton was jailed in London today. He is to serve one year in prison for what has been wrongly termed a “bomb threat.” It is quite possible, more than quite possible, that Shrimpton is being punished for coming too close to the truth, that there was really a nuclear bombing threat against the 2012 London Olympics, one of Britain’s biggest secrets of the last 100 years.

The crown’s case is predicated primarily on the impossibility of nuclear weapons being used, stolen or transported and, secondly, that the organization Shrimpton believes responsible, the mysterious DVD, or Deutsches Verteidigungs Dienst, actually exists.

Shrimpton himself is an enigmatic character, closely aligned politically with America’s neocons, a strong backer of Netanyahu and all causes “right wing.” He lives in a world filled with freemason conspiracies and the belief that German intelligence agencies working with the Bush family are still active in world affairs, albeit drug running and terrorist conspiracies.

For someone inside the intelligence community, his beliefs are roughly within the range of the “unspoken norm.” The Bush family does have a well-established history of supporting Nazi Germany, as laboriously documented by historian Webster Tarpley and it is also a well-established fact that Western intelligence agencies turned to the Nazi Gehlen operatives who led MI 6 and the CIA throughout the Cold War.

Former OSS operative and CIA director, Allen Dulles, along with his brother, former US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, were at the center of this “conspiracy,” if one were to choose to call it that. Allen Dulles was fired by President John Kennedy for his involvement in planning the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Kennedy had made pronouncements of “Denazifying” the CIA and was killed soon after. Shrimpton has only been imprisoned for a year on what any American attorney, or any military or intelligence professional would consider “trumped up charges.” Shrimpton may well be considered a political prisoner.

What did Shrimpton do?

We have been able to confirm these facts:

Shrimpton met with an intermediary with a background in intelligence that told him a story. This story involved the theft of a nuclear weapon and of its transport by submarine to Britain.

Shrimpton tried to use back channels through a former Defense Ministry official, Phillip Hammond, to pass this story on.

Shrimpton also called the public tip line of MI 6, Britain’s version of the CIA. The number he phoned is listed online and is specifically designated for passing on rumors and unsubstantiated threats. This fact was withheld at trial.

Theories about a German based secret agency, akin to “SPECTRE” out of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels (Fleming had worked for MI 6), were not included in the information Shrimpton received.

After Shrimpton’s computers were seized, he was charged with possession of child pornography. When forensic examination of the material showed it to have been dated and/or downloaded after the equipment was in police custody, these charges were reduced and pushed “under a rug.”

The issue of law is a simple one as are the fact in the case:

If Shrimpton received the information he indicates, and this fact has not been questioned, would he be equally culpable were he to have failed to act exactly has he has? The answer to this, according to British law is an astounding “yes!”

It is not the responsibility of any private citizen neither to vet information they overhear nor to investigate information of criminal activity but only to pass such information on to authorities. Investigative agencies, police and security, exist only to receive such information, as much of it as possible. This is called “intelligence.”

Failure to investigate altered evidence, were the case to be tried in the US, would represent “obstruction of justice,” criminal acts themselves, one count for every downloaded image.

As Shrimpton, author of Spyhunter, and known confidant of directors of more than one US intelligence agency, has clear access to this grade of intelligence, confirmed as true or not, it would be as likely that this case results from a need to silence or discredit Shrimpton as to discourage others from bringing information to British police or security organizations. Do you see where this is going?

Let me put this in a personal perspective. There are many private intelligence contracting groups, now a $20 billion dollar industry. I run one of those groups and, as part of my normal employment meet with defense and intelligence officials, attend conferences and have information cross my desk hourly that could affect events.

By corporate standards, and yes, intelligence collection and analysis is now “big business,” Shrimpton’s behavior is irresponsible. In a corporate environment, we would meet and discuss the information given, even if that information involved midget submarines and atomic bombs. We might quietly pass the information on, if we deemed it unreliable, perhaps with a bit of humor or, worse still, we might well do nothing at all if we deemed warning the relevant government to be potentially damaging to stockholder interests.

Shrimpton may well have been trying to engage in a similar process when he phoned Phillip Hammond, who might well have advised him to remain silent.

What we do know about Shrimpton’s situation is the both the National Security Agency in the US and Israel’s Mossad have followed Shrimpton’s arrest. Rumors, and I am forced to term them that, are that due to the extreme nature of the threat passed on, neither agency would contact MI 6 on Shrimpton’s behalf. Both were asked to and I can state categorically that the Israelis did respond sympathetically.

There is another even “stickier” point. Was any of what Shrimpton claimed true? This should now and always have been the preeminent concern. In order to learn whether Shrimpton was making this up, I went to one of my friends, a nuclear physicist and former investigator with the IAEA who has worked in Moscow. The IAEA or International Atomic Energy Agency is a UN group tasked with investigating nuclear proliferation issues including the theft of nuclear materials.

My friend told me that he had attended and acted as a presenter at a security conference for oil and defense executives in Tulsa, Oklahoma in March 2013. At that conference, attended by dozens of prominent industry leaders and Washington “insiders,” a story deeply paralleling Shrimpton’s was told by a member of the Russian delegation.

No one laughed.

The story involved a midget submarine that picked up a stolen nuclear weapon in Bremerhaven, Germany, and transported it to waiting agents at an undisclosed location along the Thames estuary. The story, as it goes on, told of the weapon being placed in a warehouse only a few miles from the Olympic Stadium. The rationale, we are told, was to affect some change in British policy, using both the presence of this weapon and this demonstration of capability, as leverage.

I then asked, “What happened to the weapon?”

I was told, “American Nuclear Emergency Security Teams (NEST) at the orders of President Obama entered Britain and recovered the weapon. The British government is extremely upset at President Obama.”

We were told America acted because it couldn’t allow a key NATO partner, a “nuclear partner” to be blackmailed and compromised.

Tonight, Barrister Michael Shrimpton will sleep in a prison cell while hundreds of prominent British citizens, some former ministers and MPs, complicit in sex crimes against children and even murder do not. This is a story of British priorities and justice, a very sad story.

Gordon Duff is a Marine combat veteran of the Vietnam War that has worked on veterans and POW issues for decades and consulted with governments challenged by security issues. He’s a senior editor and chairman of the board of Veterans Today, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”

Shrimpton is particularly noted for his claims concerning his role in the intelligence community and for his theories on the infiltration of British society by German spies and saboteurs.

Shrimpton describes himself as a “national security and intelligence specialist”.[1][20][21] He claims that his address is the headquarters of an international intelligence network[22] and that he has travelled the world on intelligence assignments, with contacts in the CIA, FBI, MI6, Pentagon, Chinese intelligence, and the British Parliament.[5] He credits himself with a role in several intelligence successes, including the capture of Osama bin Laden.[23]

Police and court officials and the mainstream press have generally rejected Shrimpton’s claims as grandiose conspiracy theories that he uses to bolster his reputation and to ingratiate himself to those with real power.[28][26][29][25] He is known to police forces across the United Kingdom as an “intelligence nuisance”.[33][21][34] Shrimpton denies that he is mentally ill or a compulsive liar,[5] and a psychiatric evaluation at his 2014 bomb hoax trial showed no criminally relevant evidence of mental illness.[35] His defence counsel nonetheless suspected him to be suffering from a developmental or personality disorder such as autism or narcissistic personality disorder.[24][35]

M.N.: Continue this Purge!

M.N.: Continue this Purge: relentlessly and objectively. Use it to clean up and to strengthen the FBI but do the comprehensive reassessment and reevaluation of the big issues: Liberty and the FBI policing of thoughts, beliefs, political convictions (“Cointelpro”, etc.), its blatant, counterproductive, self-destructive for the advanced civil Society interference in all areas of life. FBI, know your place! Build the relations with the Academic and the Scientific Communities, you need their help!

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THE NEWS AND TIMES: Bike with Mike!

“The RIDER &The WOLF” offers a large variety of bikes for all your riding and wolfing needs; for the high roads, and for the low roads also. Get in touch with Mike, he will help you to choose the right bike for you.

Multiple and Unlimited Cross System: Cross them as many times as needed, without hesitations and the purposes of evasion. Who needs to evade them? They evade themselves.

Barr’s first task as AG: Look at former FBI leaders’ conduct | TheHill The HillIt's important to know whether FBI leaders met agency obligations under the Attorney General Guidelines in the Trump-Russia investigation. "fbi" - Google News

Barr’s first task as AG: Look at former FBI leaders’ conduct | TheHill The HillIt's important to know whether FBI leaders met agency obligations under the Attorney General Guidelines in the Trump-Russia investigation. "fbi and trump" - Google News

Op-Ed: MLK Offers a Lesson on Why We Should Be Worried About Amazon and the FBI Rolling StoneAs FBI director J. Edgar Hoover became increasingly disturbed by the growing political power of the Civil Rights Movement — and paranoid about its possible ... "fbi" - Google News

Op-Ed: MLK Offers a Lesson on Why We Should Be Worried About Amazon and the FBI Rolling StoneAs FBI director J. Edgar Hoover became increasingly disturbed by the growing political power of the Civil Rights Movement — and paranoid about its possible ... "fbi surveillance" - Google News

OVERVIEW: #NPAInquiry hears testimony from acting NDPP Ramaite, former SCCU head Jordaan on first day News24Day one of the Mokgoro Inquiry into the fitness of advocates Nomgcobo Jiba and Lawrence Mrwebi to hold office saw testimony from acting NPA head Dr Silas ... "political crimes" - Google News Crime and Criminology from Michael_Novakhov (8 sites)

India's First All-Women Political Party Launched, To Contest In 283 Seats NDTV NewsIndia's first-ever all-women political party -- the National Women's Party (NWP) -- was launched on Monday in Mumbai and it will contest half of the 545 Lok ... "political crimes" - Google News Crime and Criminology from Michael_Novakhov (8 sites)